


without the blind optimism of ignorance

by void_fish



Category: The Half of It (2020)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:02:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24431029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/void_fish/pseuds/void_fish
Summary: Life begins on the other side of despair.-Jean Paul Sartre-Ellie is twenty three when her father dies.
Relationships: Ellie Chu/Aster Flores
Comments: 11
Kudos: 229





	without the blind optimism of ignorance

**Author's Note:**

> i watched this beautiful, devastating film and then immediately opened a google doc and wrote this in about an hour and a half. it is extremely unedited, and many innocent em dashes died to make it possible. i am not sorry.
> 
> major character death tag is, as you may have guessed, the death in the literal summary. i figured better be safe than sorry.
> 
> if you like stream of consciousness writing and feelings about going back to the place you grew up, then this is the fic for you!

_ Life begins on the other side of despair. _

_ -Jean Paul Sartre _

_ - _

Ellie is twenty three when her father dies.

It’s-- slow and sudden all at once. He is fine, and then he is ill, and then he is gone.

Ellie is in Montana when it happens. Her fingernails are bitten to the cuticle. She’s dogeared the page of her book so badly it tears down the crease. The middle of nowhere flies past her at a hundred miles an hour. Her phone rings and-- she knows.

-

Ellie meant to come home sooner. She should have. Could have. But there was school, and then she got an internship over the summer, and then a part time job, and-- there was always something, is the point. And Squahamish wasn’t going anywhere. Her father wasn’t going anywhere.

It looks the same, when the train pulls in. It should look different, she thinks, duffel over one shoulder. Should look-- less. There’s something missing, but you couldn’t tell by looking at the house she grew up in. The kitchen light is on, same as always. She can hear the clatter of the Munskys in the near distance. 

Paul greets her at the door to her own house. He looks grey and exhausted, deep purple bruises under his eyes. 

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. Says it again.

The train takes twenty three hours to get from Montana to Squahamish. Ellie doesn’t understand how she can have tears left.

-

She wakes up the next morning to rain. It feels appropriate. Thematic.

It rained when they buried her mother, too. 

Deacon Flores is giving the ceremony. Five years and he’s still the only priest in the entire town. Ellie didn’t find God in Iowa, but she walks into that tiny church, looks up to the piano she used to play, and something in her chest cavity settles, just a little.

-

Grinnel is good. Better than good. Ellie meets people. Other Chinese people. Other-- people like her. It’s-- good.

She still talks to Paul a lot. He’s still making sausage. He’s helping to coach the high school football team. He’s helping her father with his English.

(Ellie suspects it’s more like they’re helping each other).

‘We came this close to winning a game!’ he says, one day, while she’s cycling to class. ‘Your dad was so excited.’

Of all the things in all of the Pacific-Northwest for her father to fill his time with after she left, terrible high school football was so far down the list Ellie doesn’t think it was even on there.

‘So,’ he says. ‘How’s Iowa? How’s--’ he tails off. She picks up. He’s still new at this, but he’s trying. It’s more than she thought she’d get.

‘It’s good,’ she says. ‘Great. I--’ She pauses. ‘I have a date this weekend.’

She can hear his smile down the phone. ‘That’s awesome,’ he says. ‘What’s her name?’

‘Annabeth,’ she says, letting herself smile too. ‘She plays the violin.’

‘Is she hot?’

‘Yeah,’ Ellie says, because it’s true, and because she knows that’s what Paul wants to hear. Annabeth is tall and has waves of dark hair and has a rosary tattooed on her wrist and a whole row of tiny silver hoops tracing the shell of one ear. 

‘Good,’ he says, fond. ‘And you know, if you ever need help…’

‘I know not to ask you,’ she finishes. She’s glad they can joke about it now. It took-- a while. Even after, when they were okay. When he’d apologised for everything. When he promised to look after her dad. It was still tender then, but now, six months and several thousand miles away, it’s like poking at a well-healed scar. She can feel it, but it doesn’t hurt.

-

Squahamish got a Starbucks while she was gone.

Ellie is sitting in Paul’s car across from it after the funeral. They had been the only ones there. There wasn’t to be a wake. Just her and Paul in her dead father’s house eating taco sausage and watching Gone With The Wind.

Seeing Aster is like transporting back to her eighteen year old self, just for a second. Just for a single heartbeat, long enough to remember the look on her face after Ellie kissed her.

She’s cut her hair. She’s wearing a raincoat that swallows her. Ellie can’t forget that bone structure, though.

Classical, she called it once.

She doesn’t spot Ellie. She’s ducking into the Starbucks, shoulders hunched.

Neither Ellie or Paul say a word. Eventually, Paul starts the car and they drive home.

-

A week turns into two. Turns into a month. 

Every train that passes, she could get on. Could go home. She knows there’s nothing really keeping her here, and everything keeping her in Grinnel.

Annabeth texts her a couple of times. Mostly emojis and platitudes. Ellie appreciates it.

She visits her parent’s graves.

She visits her old high school.

She doesn’t see anyone.

-

Ellie doesn’t believe in chance. Just add it to the list of things that are for other people, she thinks.

She keeps seeing Aster. She can’t decide whether it’s because she’s looking, or because the town is so small it’s impossible to avoid her, or-- anyway.

Aster is still beautiful in a way that no one else is here.

-

Ellie has been back in Squahamish for six weeks when it happens.

The door to the grocery store still sticks. Ellie grits her teeth and shifts all her bags to one hand to tug at it. It flies open and she has to steady herself. One of the bags slips out of her grasp to the floor, scattering oranges.

Her hand meets Aster’s on the final piece of fruit as she scrambles to pick them up.

‘Oh,’ she says, and stops. Leaves her hand there, holding Aster and holding the orange at the same time like she’s become a statue.

Aster offers her a half smile that turns solemn. ‘I was sorry to hear about your dad,’ she says. They both stand up. Ellie has grown into her skin since leaving, but she still can’t match the careless grace with which Aster controls her body. 

‘Thanks,’ Ellie says, because she doesn’t know what else she can say. She opens her mouth, thinks about adding to it, and stops. Her teeth click together.

‘I didn’t realise you were still here,’ Aster adds. ‘You-- you look good.’

Ellie has worn the same shirt four days in a row and hasn’t showered in at least as long. She knows, objectively, that Aster is lying.

‘You cut your hair,’ Ellie says.

Aster flushes, tucks a strand behind her ear as best she can. It tumbles forward again. 

Ellie pretends not to notice the lack of a ring on the third finger of her left hand.

‘Can I-- help?’ Aster asks. She’s still holding the rogue orange. 

‘I can manage,’ Ellie says, on instinct. She’s throwing her walls back up. She shouldn’t have let them down so easily.

‘I know,’ Aster says. ‘Needing help and accepting it are two different things.’

Ellie swallows. Holds out one of the bags. Shifts another to her now free hand, and they walk together.

‘I thought-- art school?’ she asks.

Four years of college education gets you a lot, she thinks, only a little bitterly, but it doesn’t prepare you for everything. Doesn’t prepare you for conversations with your first love.

‘Graduated last year. I-- I’m between things.’

Ellie nods, and the rest of the walk takes place in silence. Halfway home, it starts to rain.

-

There’s a mural in Squahamish.

Not the one everyone knows about, the angel on the side of the butcher’s store.

This one, no one knows about. Or, almost no one.

There is a bridge just outside of town. The kind of bridge that fosters fairy tales, stories of trolls waiting to eat innocent billy goats and children that don’t finish their vegetables. If you climb down into the brush, to the water’s edge, there is a secret cave. Inside this cave, there is a painting.

Ellie found it by accident.

It is of the night sky. It is purple and navy and rose and gold. There is an astronaut, waving as he floats up towards the ceiling. There are planets. There is a sun, red-orange and burning.

There is a signature, near the bottom. Diega Rivero.

It takes eighteen year old Ellie longer than it should, to connect the dots.

-

Ellie quits her summer job.

She didn’t like it much anyway.

She spends her days in Squahamish outside. The house aches if she sits in it for too long, so. She hikes.

She stumbles upon the hot spring without realising.

She wonders how many other teenagers fell in love in the warm water.

She pauses. Listens to the sound of the woods. There’s no one around for miles. She slips off her coat. Toes out of her shoes.

The water is the closest thing to calm she’s felt since her phone rang on a train passing through Montana. 

-

Ellie learnt a lot in college. She learnt about Foucault. She learnt how to kiss girls.

These two things are not necessarily unrelated.

Diana is tall and gorgeous. Her hair is shorn almost to the skin, and her eyes are so dark Ellie can’t look at them for too long.

They meet during a heated debate in class, and they meet again after, at the student bar, and then meet again, in Ellie’s dorm room. In the biblical sense. 

Diana doesn’t believe in God either. Ellie thinks that might be why they don’t work out.

-

Paul is in Ellie’s yard when she and Aster get back. He looks concerned, and then relieved, and then concerned again.

‘Aster,’ he says, by way of greeting. He flinches, imperceptible, when she gives him a smile.

‘I’m not mad anymore,’ she says. ‘We were kids.’

Paul doesn’t looks any less unsettled.

‘I made braised pork,’ he says, trailing them into the house. ‘I thought-- I didn’t know you were bringing company back.’

‘Oh, I’m not staying,’ Aster says. She unloads the groceries onto the kitchen table. ‘I was just helping out.’

Every bone in Ellie’s body is crying for her to stay. Every beat of Ellie’s heart tells her it’s a bad idea.

-

Ellie heals slowly. Always has.

‘It didn’t hurt like this when my mother died,’ she says. She’s lying in the yard, guitar over her hips. Paul is next to her, smoking the dregs of a cigarette.

‘Things hurt different when you’re a kid. You bounce back quicker. Like drinking. I can’t get drunk without a hangover anymore.’

Ellie laughs. ‘You’re twenty three.’

‘And I get a hangover when I drink too much,’ Paul insists. ‘You have like-- a grief hangover.’

Ellie looks up at the stars, considers that.

‘At least with hangovers you can take Advil,’ she muses.

‘There has to be some kind of grief Advil,’ Paul says. ‘Like-- getting a huge glass of water and some eggs, but emotionally.’

Ellie hums. Picks out a chord on her guitar. It’s out of tune, but she doesn’t mind so much anymore. ‘Grief breakfast,’ she says. 

-

‘Why is it always raining when I see you?’ Aster asks, holding her umbrella over them both.

Ellie combs her hair out of her face with her fingers, tries and fails to dry her glasses.

‘It’s Squahamish,’ she says. ‘When is it not raining?’

Ellie has been home for four months. Summer is ending. She has to go back to Iowa. Back to the PhD program she’s about to start. The program she’s been waiting her whole life for.

There is still nothing keeping her here, but-- she can’t leave, even so. The threat-- the promise-- the-- something of Aster is keeping her here. She knows that now.

‘Do you remember that day after we graduated?’ Ellie asks. She doesn’t clarify further. Either Aster will know, and they’ll talk about it, or she won’t, and they won’t need to.

Aster is quiet. ‘The day before you left,’ she says. 

Ellie chews her lip. She’d broken that habit, back in Iowa.

‘Do you remember--’

They’re walking aimlessly. Neither of them have anywhere to be. Not really.

Aster is quiet. She’s waiting for Ellie.

Ellie knows the feeling. 

‘I’m sorry it took me five years to come back.’ she finishes, finally. ‘I meant to come sooner, but.’

‘People either leave Squahamish and don’t look back, or they spend their whole lives without the boundaries of the town,’ Aster says. ‘I thought I’d never see you again. Five years is better than never.’

Ellie doesn’t have a response. She isn’t sure what she thought she’d achieve, poking at this old wound. Her heart is already sluggish, running on empty. If she punctures one more hole in herself, she’ll deflate completely.

‘I spent a lot of time at art school thinking,’ Aster says. ‘I-- wanted to be sure.’

‘Sure of what?’

Aster stops walking. Ellie carries on for three steps, long enough for the rain to drip down the back of her neck. 

‘Whether things were different. Or-- could be different.’ She’s barely audible above the rain. ‘Whether I was different.’

Ellie turns to look at her. Aster at eighteen was beautiful. Aster at twenty three is brilliant. ‘Did you figure it out?’

Aster laughs. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘So, I guess-- no. Not really.’

Ellie’s throat tightens. She can’t do this again. She can’t-- there are so many things Ellie can’t do right now, but this is near the top of the list.

‘I think I’m starting to, though,’ Aster says, just as Ellie is about to turn away again. ‘If you’ll give me time.’

‘I’m leaving,’ Ellie says. ‘I have to go back to school.’

Something like hurt passes across Aster’s face. ‘Oh,’ she says. She’s wrong-footed, off balance. Good, part of Ellie thinks, viciously.

A bigger part opens like a flower. Like her chest cavity has cracked open. 

‘I-- have a futon,’ Ellie adds. ‘I won’t have a lot of free time, but… Grinnel’s nice in the fall.’

Ellie at eighteen loved Aster. Ellie at twenty three loves Aster. The two halves of her fuse together. It’s as easy as that.


End file.
